The Dovekeepers (14 page)

I knelt down to see hundreds of bones on the floor, left behind by the Romans when they fled. The ground was speckled with white shards. I had no idea what they signified. Yet I was deeply affected to see the sharp little bones, so hollow the wind made a song of them. I felt I was being watched. I gazed up to see that a dove had lit on the wall. I was quiet and held out my hands. After all I’d done and all my sins, it came to me, unafraid.

IN THE MORNING
a girl was sent to find me, perhaps one of those who’d run by me on the way to the baths, a girl too young and innocent to know what secrets there were between women and men, who thought what you observed in the daylight was all there was and had no knowledge of the night. She was polite and pretty, no older than thirteen, with little earrings of carnelian and gold in her ears. She said her name was Nahara, which she shyly explained meant light. She had brought me a pair of sandals. She laughed when I hesitated, distrusting a gift from a stranger. “You’ll need these where you’re about to go,” she informed me.

My own sandals had been ruined by my long journey, the leather falling off in strips. I slipped on the new ones to find they fitted me perfectly. As we went along, Nahara informed me that she was bringing me to the position to which I’d been assigned. She asked for my name, a word I’d not spoken aloud for so long I had nearly forgotten its sound.

“My name is ugly,” I assured her. “Unlike yours.”

We walked together across the Western Plaza, which had been paved with huge stones brought across the sea from Greece. Nahara kept pace beside me. “I have to call you something,” she insisted. She was a serious, quiet girl, but stubborn, set between an older sister and a younger brother, accustomed to making her own way.

There were those who believed if you knew the name of something
you had access to its essence. Most parents would not reveal a male child’s name after birth, not until he was circumcised eight days later, so he could gather his strength and not be as vulnerable to demons who might call to him. Nahara shrugged when I said every name was a secret known only to
Adonai.
She insisted I probably had a beautiful name, for I had the most beautiful hair she had ever seen. All the women in the settlement were talking about it, she told me. They said I had been burned in a fire and that was the cause of the flecks on my skin and my flame-colored hair.

“They should be careful I don’t breathe on them,” I warned. “I could be a dragon. They might be covered by sparks.”

Nahara laughed, then confided that her mother had spied me in the
auguratorium
and thought I had a special talent. “That’s why you’ll work with us in the dovecotes. She chose you when she saw you in the tower.”

My heart sank. There were so many places I would have preferred to be sent, nearly anywhere would have been an improvement: the olive groves, the bakers’, even the goat barns. There were three
columbaria,
the Roman-style dovecotes, where I was to work. Two were built as oblongs, but the third was a circular tower with a platform on the top floor used for observation. The windows of all were covered by screens, so prying hawks couldn’t enter. All three buildings were made of stone and covered with white plaster, raised from the ground so that snakes in search of eggs couldn’t slither inside. Thousands of birds were kept, and each of the niches carved into the white walls housed a pair of doves, mated for life.

During the time when the Roman garrison occupied Masada, the shelves had been used as funerary chambers, to store the ashes of the dead, but now they once again housed nesting turtledoves. Whatever the Romans had corrupted during their time here after King Herod’s fall, our rebels took back for their own usage. What they had used for death had been transformed into life in the beating hearts of the doves. We did not believe in turning flesh to ash
but rather in honoring the bones of our forefathers returning the body to the earth, from whence it came in the days of creation. What had housed the dead during the Roman occupation was once more filled with song, the cooing
tirr tirr
I had learned to imitate in the wilderness so that the doves might come to me and consider me one of their own.

Among the abominations the Romans had committed was to use the synagogue for their stables. People said it had taken weeks to clean out the excrement and cleanse the area. Even now there was said to be the smell of horseflesh when the rains came, so incense was lit every morning. But no incense could disguise the rich, moist odor of the doves’ leavings, which assaulted me when Nahara led me into the stone dovecote. Of the three, this was the largest, filled with the stench of the birds. Even worse was the noise. When we entered the murk through heavy wooden doors, the sound was overwhelming, for together the doves shared one voice. I stopped, shaken by the fluttering of wings, once again yearning for the silence I had known in the wilderness.

Nahara smiled when she saw my reaction, her face upturned. “They don’t bite,” she promised. “You’ll become accustomed to them.”

She picked up a bird that had fluttered to the floor, holding it gently. We were to care for them, feed them, collect their eggs. Most important, we were to gather their excrement, used to fertilize the fields. That was why such beautiful groves arose on this cliff, where the soil was little more than limestone covered with a thin dusting of earth, and why the air smelled like almonds. The doves’ leavings turned the fields fertile; their waste was the secret to creating a garden in the wilderness.

There were three other women in the dovecote, all busy until our arrival. Now they turned to me. One would imagine such nasty business would have been the last sort of work anyone would have wanted, but these women seemed proud of what they did.
One, an older woman whose name was Revka, gazed at me disapprovingly, as though I had stumbled uninvited into her domain and she had already gauged me as unworthy. The others were Nahara’s elder sister and mother, each more beautiful than the other. Aziza was sixteen, composed, with dusky olive skin. As she stood beside her mother, I could hardly tell them apart. But it was Shirah, the mother, who had chosen me.

Nahara whispered for me to step forward, reminding me of her mother’s faith in me. I wondered if her choice had been made when she spied the dove who came to me without being called.

In this place of noise, Shirah was serene, a dark quiet engulfing her. I approached her, then stopped, flustered. Our glances met, and I felt something unexpected between us, a surge of heat. It seemed I was transparent in her eyes.

“I wonder how a lioness will manage in a dovecote. Can you put away your teeth and claws?”

The other women had gathered round, and they laughed at Shirah’s comment. I felt vulnerable and exposed, even though the chamber was dim, with only thin streams of sunlight entering through the roof and screened windows.

Shirah had one long black braid down her back. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with high cheekbones and dark, nearly black eyes. The other women thought she was teasing me, having sensed my displeasure over handling birds. They didn’t understand what she meant. But I did. She knew what was inside me.

“Hardly a lioness,” I said contritely. “Only a poor wanderer.”

“Aren’t we all?” the older woman, Revka, replied. “You think you’re so different from us? You’re not too good to shovel the shit of these doves, are you?” she asked scornfully. “If you are, you can leave right now.”

The women were gazing at my red hair. As Nahara had said, it was what people noticed first. Perhaps they believed that the tawny color was what Shirah referred to when she spoke of lions. They
had no idea who I was or what I’d done. The birds fluttered around, unbidden, drawn to me. I kept my eyes downcast as I spoke. All I wished was to be left alone.

“I’ll do whatever work you ask of me,” I said.

Do unto me what you desire, whatever your will. I deserve nothing more than what has befallen me.

Shirah approached with a basket formed of palm leaves, beautifully constructed with a leaf-over-leaf pattern. Her eyes were huge and deep, ringed with kohl. She wore gold bracelets on her arms and amulets tied around her throat on red string, including two gold charms, which glinted in the half-light. Her daughters came and circled their arms around their mother’s slim waist. Their love for her was evident, and I envied them. I wished I’d known what it was like to have a mother, someone who would stand beside you no matter what you’d done.

The birds were cooing. I felt a pulse in my throat, remembering how I had waited for my prey in the wilderness, how they had come to me and how I had destroyed them. Shirah handed me the basket. I wondered if it had been woven with palm leaves from Ein Gedi, if some woman had set down the crossing leaves pattern on the morning of her own death.

“Even a lioness has to work,” Shirah told me.

THE WORK BEGAN
right away. We were all wearing white, for vivid color was thought to disturb the doves and keep them from laying. Perhaps it had not been an accident when the Essene woman, Tamar, gave me my tunic, for it seemed as though she’d somehow known I would be chosen for the dovecote. Perhaps I wasn’t as invisible as I had imagined.

There was no time to doubt myself or to complain. Aziza quickly taught me how to feed our charges millet and wheat and vetch, and how to chase the pairs from their niches when we needed to collect
eggs or clean out their droppings. Whichever eggs we let remain in the nests would soon hatch, and the parents would care for the fledglings together. Aziza was eager to help me learn the ways of the dovecote. She resembled a deer, with slim legs and arms, and a thick braid of dark hair, like her mother’s, glossy, black as night. But whereas Shirah’s eyes were pitch, Aziza’s were an unusual pale gray, like river water, filled with moving light. There was a tiny scar, much like a teardrop, barely noticeable, set beneath one eye.

Nahara came to gossip with her sister about me. Both sisters’ eyes were shining. They enjoyed having someone new to tease, an occasion to break the monotony of their workday. “She wouldn’t tell her name when I asked,” Nahara informed Aziza.

The sisters stood with their hands on their hips, considering what to do with me. I was ashamed to be considered worthy of their interest.

“We have to call you something,” Aziza insisted, wanting to befriend me.

The sisters were so close their words were like beads on the same strand of gold. Perhaps if I said my name aloud, I’d be rid of their prying. We were to work side by side, after all, and they needed to call to me.

“Yael,” I managed, for it was a word that left a bitter taste in my mouth. It had always sounded like a curse, and it remained so on this day.

The sisters seemed satisfied, assuring me that mine was a beautiful name.

“Do you have anyone here with you?” They wanted to know more about me, so that we might be friends. I shrugged coldly, with only a gleam of response.

A lion, a ghost, a goat who is an angel, a hundred birds with broken necks.

“I was brought here by my brother. Amram, son of Yosef bar Elhanan.”

To my surprise, their curiosity faded, and my words dropped like stones. I heard the echo of my brother’s name. The silence that came back to me was something I understood, the realm of secrets best left untold.

Nahara was called to her mother. She seemed grateful to have an excuse to run out to the smallest of the dovecotes, even though the dovekeepers usually recoiled from working there, for the building was so compact only one person could stand within its walls. Beside me, Aziza quickly returned to her work, chasing the doves away, collecting their eggs. I could see through the mirror of her languid, gray eyes. She didn’t have to say any more for me to understand how my brother’s name had blazed for her. Once spoken, it refused to disappear.